


A Very TARDIS Christmas

by Moirae (TigerDragon), TiaNadiezja



Series: All of Space and Time [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Adventure, Always-a-girl!Doctor, Christmas, Committed Relationship, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Parents & Children, Partnership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:23:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/Moirae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiaNadiezja/pseuds/TiaNadiezja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, Mistress of Time and Space, and her companion Miss Adler are taking an early Christmas this year, which is one of the advantages of time travel. Of course, one never knows what surprises novelty will bring with it, and time travel can have as many unpleasant surprises as pleasant ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very TARDIS Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophiagratia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/gifts).



> When Tia and I decided to do a Doctor Who Christmas Special of our own, we knew almost immediately that it had to be our intrepid Lady Doctor and her indomitable Companion Isabel. We loved writing them in Loyalties, have always meant to come back to them, and this presented the perfect opportunity. It also, as it turned out, proved a perfect chance to seed a bit of a mystery which we fully intend to answer in the future - something for all of you to ponder when you finish. 
> 
> As far as gifts go, of course, there was only one choice - not only did sophiegrace provide an enormously kind compliment to us soon after we finished this piece, but her work has always been a favorite of mine (anyone who hasn't read her _Topics in Practical Aerodynamics_ must absolutely do so, right away). So sophie, we hope this finds you well and happy, and that a late revisitation is better than never.
> 
> From the Beginning to the End with all of you,  
> Dragon and Tia

“Do you know what the best part of being a time traveller is?”  The Doctor’s voice rang out over the din in the control room - not only the ever-present hum of the console and the stuck emergency brake, but also a model train chugging on a track elevated over the raised platform around the console, a group of robotic elves dancing under a Christmas tree in the corner, and, most overpoweringly, a very loud and somewhat amelodic recording of _Ding Dong, Merrily On High_ playing over an entirely separate sound system from any of the four that Isabel had been aware of before this moment. It made a dreadfully joyous cacophony, which would have been  more tiresome if it had not brought such a lovely grin to the lips of the Time Lord (or Lady? Isabel had never quite sorted that part out) whose cavorting - both temporal and horizontal - constituted Isabel Adler’s chief interest in life. So she put up with the robot elves and the model trains and the alien choirs singing old Earth Christmas carols, and plotted her little revenges.  
  
The dress she was wearing at the moment, for instance. “No, my darling,” she called from the top of the control room stairs, leaning against the rail and enjoying a long moment’s anticipation, “what is the best part of being a time traveller?”  
  
The Doctor took a moment to admire that dress (Tularian, primarily silksteel and adamant, internally illuminated and entirely illegal on Gallifrey as a public indecency) before responding.  “You don’t have to wait for Christmas.  You can go _to_ Christmas.  Which is what we’re doing today.”  She grinned widely.  “We’re going to Christmas.  The only question is, which one?”  
  
Isabel gracefully mounted the rail of the stairs and slid down, trusting the Doctor’s hands to catch her on her arrival at the end of the line and finding her faith entirely rewarded. “A proper Christmas,” she breathed into her beloved’s mouth, “must have dancing and an orchestra, hot cider and nog, a good Christmas pudding and a fine roast goose.”  
  
The Doctor settled her lover more comfortably into her arms once the initial urgency of the kiss passed, leaning up to pressing her lips to Isabel’s forehead and silently cataloging the scent of cinnamon and thurnwick blossoms as a new favorite. She had a lot of favorites, and she’d found most of them on Isabel.  “So,” she began, “the eighteenth or nineteenth century.  Or the twenty-fifth.  Or the ten thousandth...”  She smiled.  “The best things always come back.”  
  
“Surprise me with somewhere new,” Isabel told her, eyes dancing with delight. “But then, you knew I’d say that, didn’t you?”  
  
“It’s one of the things I like best about you.”  The Doctor ran a gloved hand along Isabel’s jaw before releasing her and bounding up the steps.  “Somewhere new and surprising, with dancing and orchestras and cider and nog and pudding and goose.  Definitely one of the things I like best about you.  And has to be...”  She grabbed a wheel nearly as large as her own head and, with some difficulty, gave it three full spins.  “Yes... there!”  She spun to face Isabel and the door, lifting her hand and snapping her fingers.  Beyond the door was a group of trees, all decked with garland and ornaments in red and white and green, and a quaint, snow-covered village lay at the end of their vision.  “December the twenty-fifth, the year thirty-five sixty-eight of the Common Era, Alpha Palis IV.  A place known, to those few outside it who know it, as _the_ Christmas village.”  
  
Laughing gently and collecting a dark, shimmering cloak from the wardrobe beside the door, Isabel offered her lover an appreciative burst of applause before muffling her hands with thin black gloves with a sheen like metal. “I do love your definite articles, darling. When something earns one from you, I know I _must_ see it.”  
  
The Doctor rushed down the steps and swept an arm around Isabel’s waist.  “You know me too well, my love.”  She plucked her hat from the hat-stand next to the wardrobe with her free hand and perched it on her head, and Isabel deftly slipped her arm long enough to slide the Doctor’s long brown coat around her shoulders and a warm scarf about her neck. They kissed again, Isabel’s hands resting gently on her lover’s lapels and the subtle curves beneath, and then the Doctor’s companion swept her own outrageously fashionable hat from the stand and settled it on her head with a decisive tug.  They shared a silent smile, snatched up a fine walking stick each, and went out the door of the TARDIS arm in arm.  
  
“The village was the first built when the planet was colonized, nearly four hundred years ago.  Their colony ship was disabled in a stellar storm, reduced to a quarter of its design speed, and four of their five hydroponics bays destroyed.  They were low on food, water, and air, and long-range sensors were offline.  The ship’s computer routed them toward the nearest star system - an unexplored and uncharted system far from where they planned to go, and if they could not find a world to settle on in orbit of that star, the entire crew would starve.”  The Doctor ducked past a tree, cheerfully rambling, the perpetual celestial tour guide.  “They passed out of what they believed to be the star’s green zone after scanning two planets... one had no atmosphere at all, and the other had air made of poison and acid.  Hope seemed not to exist... then, on Christmas Eve, their scanners found another planet just starting to come into view past the edge of the star.  They turned the ship and got there in less than a day.  The planet was colder than Earth, but the atmosphere was right, and the local flora very similar to what you’d find in the northern places of Europe.  The first settlers landed just before midnight... just barely still on Christmas Day.  They had a feast of star-rations, looking up at the ship that had carried them here.”  
  
“ _Deo gratias,_ ” Isabel murmured softly, tucking herself more firmly into the curve of the Doctor’s arm and smiling up at the gleaming sky full of stars with her heart in her eyes.  
  
“There...”  The Doctor pointed into the sky, at a particularly bright point of light.  “The solar panels of the colony ship, still visible after all these years.  Their Christmas star.”  
  
Isabel laughed in a great silver cascade of pleasure, tossing her walking stick into the air and clapping in delight before catching it on the way down, and she spun on the fine heels of her boots to seize the Doctor in her arms and press the smaller woman into another kiss. “My Doctor,” she breathed at last, when she had spent the best part of joy into  those star-warm lips, “you are incomparable.”  
  
“Well... yes.”  The Doctor breathed out slowly, savoring the lingering flavor of Isabel’s lips.  “I suppose I am.”  
  
“Now, if I can only have some hot cider and some well-cooked goose, my night will be complete.” Isabel spun away, still laughing softly, and pranced some twenty feet toward the soft silver lights of the village in the valley below before she came to a wondering stop. “Doctor,” she said softly, her breath scarcely the faintest plume in the still night air, “have you ever seen such a tree before?”  
  
And a sight it was, indeed - so much so that the Doctor could scarcely credit not having seen it before this moment, for it was as tall and broad as the mast of the greatest of ships and it seemed to gather the starlight around it to shimmer on its leaves of silver and dark gold. No oak ever stood prouder or pine more undaunted by cold and snow, and it stood above the slim white-trunked beauties around it like a knight among courtesans.    
  
“I... don’t think I have seen anything like it before.  Which is not something I am driven to say often...”  The Doctor pulled out her screwdriver, pointing it at the tree.  “Well... I’m not picking up anything.  Which means it’s definitely made of wood.”  
  
Isabel drew near it slowly, reaching out with a gloved hand and caressing the smooth geometric patterns of the bark with wide eyes. “It scarcely seems real,” she breathed at last. “Can it possibly belong here?”  
  
“It doesn’t belong here.”  The Doctor ran her hand along the bark slowly, then paused.  She pulled her glove off and touched it again.  “No, that can’t be right.  That can’t possibly be right...”  She closed her eyes, slowly making her way around the tree’s broad trunk.  “No.  Entirely wrong.  Impossible, in fact.  And yet...”  Then she looked at Isabel.  “You’re about to think me madder than you already do.”  She turned back to the tree and began to rap firmly on it with her bare hand.  “You in there!  Open up!”  
  
Isabel’s eyebrow rose slowly, but she stepped away a healthy distance from the tree and regarded it with a certain natural wariness. Any announcement of imminent impossibility from the Doctor was worth treating with some caution, after all, even if.... “You’re not looking for fairies, are you, my love?”  
  
“Fairies?  Maybe.  Something like fairies.  Because what ought to be inside here very certainly cannot be.  Come out, I say!”  The Doctor gave up on knocking and changed to kicking the tree firmly.  
  
“Stop that at once!” It was a young woman’s voice, rich and warm and low though at this particular moment spiked sharply with irritation, and Isabel turned to find herself looking up at a raven-haired beauty in a flowing dress of a thousand muted colors that changed and shifted as she slapped her hands together in reproof. “She doesn’t like to be kicked, and if you carry on kicking her, I shall dangle you from her branches and let her have her turn. Then we will see how you like it!”  
  
“If she doesn’t want me to kick her, she ought to open her door when I knock.  And that I have no key, which will obviously be your objection to that, should not matter, because... I do not yet know why it should not matter, but I’m sure it will come to me.  The real question is this: Why do you have this?  And...”  She paused, looking at the girl in astonishment, and her eyes were wide enough to catch starlight.  “How do you exist at all?”  
  
The young woman drew herself up to her full height, as haughty as any royalty, and arched an inquisitorial eyebrow. “And who are you,” she demanded, eyes flashing the color of the reflection of the great blue giant Cedris VII against the Cobalt Moon of Andrethane, “to ask me such a question?”  
  
“I am the Doctor.”  The Doctor spoke the words simply, without embellishment, as if they ought to stand on their own as a reason she got to do anything at all that she pleased.  
  
“Really?” Their impromptu acquaintance brushed past Isabel, who shifted her grip on her walking stick by pure reflex, and took a pair of glasses from her bodice to perch on her nose before she stared down at the lithe brunette who most of the known universe feared or half-worshipped. The girl’s expression, however, was nothing of the sort - curiosity, rather, and a kind of gawky embarrassment. “You’re sure?”  
  
“I’m fairly sure... unless I stopped being the Doctor at some point recently.”  The Doctor looked to Isabel.  “I am still the Doctor, am I not?”  
  
“Yes, darling,” Isabel murmured, shifting a little closer to provide a better angle for knocking this young madwoman senseless if the necessity arose, “you are definitely still the Doctor.”  
  
“And you are...?” The girl twisted around and peered at Isabel curiously, as if examining her for signs of hidden gears or hatches. It was not an expression Isabel cared for.  
  
“Isabel Adler,” she murmured in something that was definitely not (yet) a growl. “The Doctor’s companion.”  
  
“Oh, still? Really?” The girl frowned thoughtfully, then pulled a small book from a pocket in the dress which seemed decidedly insufficient to contain it and made a few notes with what looked for all the world like a fountain pen (whose removal spilled a few ebony strands of hair down into the girl’s face, which seemed not to concern her in the least). “Well. Well, well, well.”  
  
“And who are you?”  The Doctor glared at the woman, then at the tree, as if she were seriously contemplating kicking it once more out of spite.  
  
“Not sure yet. Haven’t quite figured that out. It’s my first time, you see, so I have to pick my name still. Mother says I should take my time, not rush things, but she was sure when she wasn’t even half my age. It’s very upsetting.” She lifted her eyes from the book and shook the tip of her pen warningly at the Doctor’s foot. “Don’t even think about it.”  
  
“Don’t think about what?”  The Doctor grumbled, looking at Isabel as if she was the only living thing around she didn’t want to kick. Isabel shrugged slightly in reply, miming smacking the girl with her stick with a small motion of her wrist, and sighed when the Doctor warned her off with a look.  
  
“That. Kicking. She doesn’t like your shoes, and I doubt I would like them either.” The girl finished her notes and dropped the journal and the pen both in her pocket, then tucked the stray hair behind her ear and peered at the Doctor again. “I thought you’d be taller. Mother always makes you sound taller.”  
  
“She’s a Time Lord...”  The Doctor sighed as if the idea itself were exhausting to her.  “Which raises the question... how is she a Time Lord?  Except she isn’t going to tell me that...”  The Doctor looked into those shimmering metal eyes, but kept talking to Isabel. Or herself. Possibly the universe as a whole.  “Because she already knows how I find out.”  
  
“Well, no. I mean, yes, I would, except we haven’t met before. We aren’t actually supposed to meet for a few more years, until after I’ve picked my name, but I was late and I didn’t think you were going to come here this year. So Mother’s going to be annoyed, but she’s always annoyed about one thing or another.” The girl reached up and took off her glasses, the hair behind her ear coming stubbornly loose in the wind, and she caught it between slender fingers to glare at it for a minute before tucking it away again. “I guess it’s the universe’s way of giving me an extra Christmas present.”  
  
“Is there any chance of you telling me who your mother is, then?”  The Doctor raised an eyebrow.  “Or is that a secret?”  
  
“Well, she’d probably be even more upset if I told you, so I won’t, because she wants it to be a surprise. But I can tell you who my father is - well, other mother, but English is stupid about that and it’s rude to talk Gallifreyan in front of lesser beings. How about that?” The girl flashed a cheerful, manic, half-familiar smile and bounced on her heels. “Can I?”  
  
Isabel had a sudden, terrible feeling of foreboding.  
  
“All right.  Out with it, then.”  The Doctor glared at the girl impatiently.  
  
“Well, if you’re going to be so rude, maybe I won’t tell you.” Spinning on her heel, colors flashing through her dress, the girl turned toward the tree as if toward an open door. “I’m a Time Lord, you know - I don’t have to stay if I don’t want to.”  
  
“Fine.  I’ll be polite.”  The Doctor inhaled, as if taking a moment to remember what politeness sounded like.  “Please?”  
  
The girl considered, bouncing on her heels again and biting her lip in a way that made her look ten instead of somewhere between fourteen and twenty, then tossed her head in agreement. “All right. But only because you asked nicely, and because it’s you.”  
  
“Well, yes, people ought to tell me things because I’m me...”  The Doctor paused, turned her head to find Isabel turning as white as the snow underfoot, then started.  “Unless you mean that I’m who it is... but that’s not possible... unless that hasn’t happened yet.”  
  
“Exactly,” the girl nodded, smiling cheerfully. “Hello, Mom.”  
  
Isabel spluttered.  
  
“This is... unexpected.”  The Doctor looked to Isabel, saw that she was, if anything, even more speechless than the Doctor herself was, then back to the girl.  Then she looked at the tree.  “You.  You should have asked.”  
  
The tree’s long branches shifted, as if in a shrug, and the girl laughed. “Yes, fine, you _did_ say I wasn’t to dawdle and I did, but she was _very_ pretty and he had lovely eyes. I didn’t want to just rush off after they’d been so exquisitely hospitable.”  
  
This time, Isabel squeaked.  
  
“Well... yes.  Not scorning hospitality is a good thing.  A polite thing, now that I’m thinking about politeness.  Necessary... what was that about eyes?”  The Doctor glared at the girl.  
  
“What?” The girl shrugged and pointed at Isabel. “Mother says I take after you, and why shouldn’t I? They’re so much fun.”  
  
“You shouldn’t take after me, because... because...”  The Doctor looked to Isabel for help and got an arched eyebrow that said a discussion about exactly what kind of fun the girl had been taking after was in her future.  “Because you’re too young!”  
  
“Psh. I’m older than they are!” The girl waved a hand dismissively and grinned. “I enjoyed it, and he showed me the most _fantastic_ trick with champagne, three fingers and a quarter-yard of silk.”  
  
“There’s a he now...”  The Doctor sighed, then said a series of words she’d never uttered in nearly a dozen lifetimes.  “I don’t want to know.”  
  
“ _We_ don’t want to know,” Isabel affirmed sharply.  
  
“Bother,” sighed the girl, and scraped a half-circle in the snow with her boot. “Mother won’t want to know either, so now I won’t be able to tell _anyone_ who doesn’t already know.”  
  
The tree rustled, and she laughed. “Fine,” she said, cheering instantly, “except you. Even if I know you were watching and are just humoring me.”  
  
“Egg nog.  And Christmas.”  The Doctor nodded decisively.  “It is time for egg nog and Christmas.  Those things, I understand.”  
  
Isabel nodded agreement, reaching for her hand, and they’d made it a whole ten steps before a voice called out from behind them. “Hey! Wait for me! We’ve already met, after all, so it’s not like I can get into any more trouble, and I want to see the Adler human dance! She looks like fun to watch dance.”  
  
“I’ll be dancing with her.  But...”  The Doctor sighed, looking up at the orbiting colony ship.  “Yes, I know.”  She turned to look at the girl.  “Come along, then.”  
  
The girl cheered, and Isabel sighed - though she smiled a fraction, too, and squeezed the Doctor’s waist instead of pulling away - and together they started back down toward the hill toward _the_ Christmas village and egg nog and dancing.  The Doctor led them to the inn, flashing the psychic paper at the proprietor and coming back with keys for two rooms.  “We’re in luck... arrived just before the festivities are set to begin.  A man will be playing music in a few minutes, and there are three cups of egg nog on the way... two of which have rum.”  
  
“Good,” Isabel said, and the girl frowned. “Wait,” she objected, “the one without rum is for the human, isn’t it?”  
  
Isabel’s eyes flashed like green sheet lightning.  
  
“No.  It’s for the youngest among us... biologically.  Among members of her species.”  The Doctor glared at the girl.  “And Isabel is not ‘the human.’  You demanded politeness from me before... I demand it from you now.”  
  
“Oh.” The girl shifted uncomfortably, looking between the two of them, then grumbled. “Mother _said_ you had peculiar ideas about them. Fine. May I have some of your egg nog, Miss Adler, since my revered parent cruelly denies me rum in mine?”  
  
“No.” Isabel flicked a small glance of thanks to her Doctor before intercepting the girl’s outraged protests with a firm smile practiced on no less than four younger siblings. “But if you stay polite, you may have a glass of hot cider at midnight.”  
  
“I’ve never had hot cider,” the girl considered. “Don’t they make it from apples?”  
  
“Yes. It’s my favorite.”  
  
“Fine, then. Cider at midnight, Miss Adler.” The girl perked up instantly at the expression on the Doctor’s face. “Why isn’t she objecting?”  
  
“She knows better,” Isabel chuckled, her smile turning impishly mysterious.  
  
“It seems there is a cosmic judge with a habit of overruling my objections...”  The Doctor took a sip of her egg nog.  “Best egg nog in all of space and time, this inn, this decade.  I have to space out visits... don’t want to run into myself, or run out of Christmases here.”  
  
“Mother says you like Christmas here best,” the girl agreed. “That’s why I wanted to come. Because Mother doesn’t like Christmas, and you do, so I thought….”  
  
“Not liking Christmas... that is something I really can’t comprehend.”  The Doctor waved the innkeeper over.  “Fruit cake!  That is what I missed last time I went to Christmas.  We need fruit cake.”  
  
Isabel made a face of disapproval, chuckling softly, then held up a finger to the innkeeper. “A goose,” she told him, “stuffing and trimmings and all, and a proper Christmas pudding as well. You do make a proper Christmas pudding, don’t you?”  
  
“Fire and all, miss,” he reassured her.  
  
“Fire?!” The girl perked up at once. “They bring you food that’s on _fire_? I love this place.”  
  
Covering her face to muffle her laughter, Isabel turned pale eyes on her beloved and shook her head wordlessly. _Exactly like you,_ those pale jade orbs told her. _Just exactly like you._  
  
 _I don’t linger when I ought not because of hes and shes with pretty eyes... with one notable exception._  The Doctor reached for Isabel’s hand.  “I see the musician setting up... he should be ready before we reach the floor.  Dance with me?”  
  
“Always, my love.” Isabel rose smoothly from the table, casting her hat and cloak aside, and she tucked herself comfortably against the Doctor’s arm as they began angling through the clusters of tables and reveling patrons toward the slowly filling dance floor. The Doctor’s hand fitted comfortably to her hip and their fingers gently interlaced, they passed out onto the floor to the first strains of the fiddle and the gathering silence of singers awaiting their mark. They turned without releasing their hands, the Doctor bowing and Isabel dropping a deep curtsey, then came together for the first step of the waltz with the easy precision of perfectly balanced gears prepared for the very purpose of maintaining the smooth tick of a horologist’s masterwork. Her Doctor knew every hitch of her breath, every tiny scar or strained muscle of her body, and she knew every flicker of her Doctor’s distraction and every pulse of the two hearts that kept her beloved alive.  
  
They suited each other.  
  
“Do you remember,” Isabel murmured at last, the lines of couples breaking apart and forming and breaking apart again as the whole dance floor revolved about them, “the night that you took me to the Beginning and End?  We danced that night too.”  
  
“I could never forget that night.”  The Doctor rose onto her toes to kiss Isabel’s temple.  “And I never will.”  
  
“Even for a woman who could give you that child?” Isabel’s smile was not unkind, nor were her eyes anything but tender, but the words stabbed deeply even so.  
  
“Not even.”  The Doctor’s hand came up to cup Isabel’s face.  “I do not know when or how the child came to be, but I swear to you that I could never forget that night.”  
  
“I believe you.” Those soft and laughing lips, which had so rarely smiled before Isabel passed through the door into the TARDIS and saw all of creation spread out before her, captured the Doctor’s again in a lingering kiss that did not disturb the steps of the dance for a single moment. “Still,” she murmured when they parted at last, “I cannot help wondering who she might be, this mysterious lover of yours who will come after I am gone.” Isabel’s eyes danced with laughter. “At least, I must presume that she will come after, for it would go ill with you if it were otherwise.”  
  
“I have no intention of compelling you to destroy me utterly in retribution.”  The Doctor rested her head against Isabel’s shoulder.  “So she must be after you are gone.  Perhaps long after.”  
  
“Not too long, I hope,” her companion murmured into the soft brown curls of her hair. “I would not have you be lonely forever.”  
  
“It is the nature of a Time Lord to be lonely.  You have allowed me to transcend that nature.”  
  
“Of course.” Isabel’s laughter was soft and rich, and the subtlest tilt of her shoulder was enough to guide the Doctor’s lips up for the gift of another kiss. “I knew you chose me because I cheated at cards.”  
  
The song came to an end, and the Doctor slowly stepped back to gaze up at Isabel as though committing her face to memory for the thousandth time.  “The rules don’t seem to function around you.”  
  
“Good.” Those ivory, glittering teeth whose edge she knew so intimately and loved so well flashed in the wreath-light. “If I’d wanted to follow rules, I’d have stayed in Suffolk. Following you is much, much better.”  
  
“Shall we return to the table?”  The Doctor offered Isabel her hand and a smile.  
  
“If we can find space at it,” Isabel consented, her own lips curved up by an anticipatory grin. “Your daughter seems to have attracted company.”  
  
The Doctor blinked at the table.  “That’s... six hims and three hers.”  Her eyes were wide, and the expression in them seemed to be a conflict between anger and admiration.  “She... does do well at what she attempts, I suppose.”  
  
“Unless you want her to attempt it here on the table,” Isabel judged with indecent cheer, “you may want to hurry.”  
  
“You are wicked.”  The Doctor pushed past the crowd to the table, and leaned over her daughter’s shoulder.  “I see you’ve failed to save seats for Isabel and I... are we no longer welcome?”  
  
The girl’s eyelashes fluttered, and the Doctor had the sudden premonition that she was about to be skewered. “Of course you’re welcome,” her daughter informed her pleasantly, “but the new rule for the table is share and share alike.”  
  
“Is that so?”  The Doctor smirked.  “Then there will, I’m afraid, be very little goose left for you, when your guests are finished with it.”  
  
“Oh!” Her daughter’s squeal of indignation mingled with the chuckles of her companions around the table and Isabel’s delighted laughter, and the Doctor’s smirk only grew. _Still have a few tricks,_ her eyes flashed over the girl’s head at her beloved.  
  
 _Always you,_ Isabella mouthed in reply, tapping one of the lads on the shoulder to banish him from his chair and send him for more. It was going to be a long night, but she no longer doubted that she was going to enjoy it.  
  
The Doctor expelled a girl from the seat next to Isabel, and sat there, reaching for her lover’s hand.  Once she had it, she leaned forward, pitching her voice just so to demand the full attention of her daughter’s remaining guests.  “Has my daughter... yes, she is my daughter... told you the story of the time I met the Dalek at the North Pole?”  
  
A wide-eyed groan went ‘round the table, and Isabella hid her laughter behind her hand at the outraged expression on the raven-haired girl’s face. _Oh yes,_ she told herself silently, _it is going to be a **very** Merry Christmas._


End file.
